Speakers Bio & Abstract

Srikanth Ponapala Agriculture Subject Matter Expert
Cyient
India

BiographySrikanth Ponapala is an Agriculture Subject Matter Expert with 14 years of experience in GIS & Remote sensing technologies, currently managing Agriculture projects within Cyient.Abstract Pilot on Crop Growth Monitoring using UAV ? Multi Spectral CameraThe regular practices followed to monitor crop growth and health condition are labor intensive and time-consuming. Cyients innovation team has carried out the pilot study covering Cotton and Paddy fields located in Marikal tehsil, Mahbubnagar district in the kharif, 2017 using commercial Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) mounted with multispectral camera (Green, Red, Red Edge and Near Infra-Red) possessed by Cyient. In this pilot study, multi-spectral camera mounted on UAV was flown over cotton and paddy crop farmer fields by Cyient drone pilots along with RGB (red, Green and Blue) camera at regular intervals (3-4 times) during crop growth period. Limited ground truthing was carried in synchronization with UAV data acquisition time period. The acquired UAV data was processed using pix4d software to generate ortho-mosaics, Digital Terrain model (DTM) and Digital Surface Model (DSM) followed by generation of various vegetation indices like Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Green Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (GNDVI) Normalized Difference Red Edge Vegetation Index (NDRE) and Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) etc. Using these indices, different types of crop stress like biotic and abiotic was identified followed by crop and site specific crop prescription was generated after each data acquisition. In addition to this, sowing or plant emergence gap areas, plant height, weed intensity areas are also identified using pre defined grid. Crop production forecast was also performed using these temporal vegetation indices. UAV mounted thermal camera data was also acquired to identify the moisture stress areas.